The Enfranchisement of Women

An essay published in the Westminster Review in July 1851, prompted by the women's rights convention held at Worcester, Massachusetts, in October 1850. It first reports the convention's demands: the vote and eligibility for office, equal access to education and the professions, partnership in productive work and its rewards, and an equal share in making and administering the laws. Taylor Mill then defends them. Excluding women contradicts the American claim that all men are created equal, radical calls for universal suffrage, and the principle that taxation goes with representation. Custom is no justification, since slavery was once defended the same way, and no group may decide another's 'proper sphere'; that can only be found through free choice. She answers objections about motherhood, competition for wages and the hardening effect of public life, argues that legal inequality corrupts marriage and the character of both sexes, and rejects the claim that women do not want equality.

It is one of the clearest early liberal arguments for women's equal rights, and shows how Harriet Taylor Mill's thinking ran alongside and fed into John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women.